IDENTITY PARADE
Mark Steyn says Senator Kennedy's proposed
law would actually make blacks attack blacks in preference to attacking whites
New Hampshire A COUPLE of years back, Al Gore was in Milwaukee making a speech about diversi- ty. The town's multi-ethnic population, he said, proves that, in the words of the Great Seal of the United States, America 'can be e pluribus unum — out of one, many'. Dan Quayle, when he supposedly claimed he couldn't speak Latin, at least knew his lim- itations. But Vice-President Gore, in his mangled translation, may have articulated the greater truth, for if anything other than oral sex distinguishes the modern Demo- cratic party it's the ferocious determina- tion to balkanise American identity: out of one, many.
The latest wheeze is the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy with the support of the Clinton administration. What is a 'hate crime'? It's a crime that results in 'bodily injury' — i.e., physical assault, rape, mur- der and so forth. You don't have to be an expert criminologist to spot that these activities are already illegal in every state in the Union. But that's not enough for Senator Kennedy. His Bill would inflict extra penalties on those criminals whose infractions are motivated by a list of feder- ally disapproved 'hatreds': race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, dis- ability. . . Doubtless more will soon spring to Senator Kennedy's expansive imagina- tion. In the meantime, if you're a mugger lurking in a dark alley, skip the black, Muslim, lesbian lardbutt (obesity is a fed- erally recognised disability) and wait for the white Episcopalian guy in perfect health. If you're a bank robber, try the Sally Field approach when you slip the note across the counter: 'This is a stick-up. I have a gun. Give me all your money. I like you, I really like you.'
'Hate crimes' is one of the great bogus innovations of the age. Indeed, you could hardly ask for a better summation of the pathetic infantilism of Washington. It should not be the purpose of the law to protect gays from straights or blacks from whites or gays from blacks; it should be to protect all citizens from any criminal — whether he's motivated by racial hatred or by the fake Rolex on your wrist. Yet, if Senator Kennedy has his way, Americans will no longer be equal under the law: So why's he doing this? Two words, says Ted: Jasper, Texas. On 7 June, in this run- of-the-mill hicksville, one man (black) was chained by three other men (white) to the back of a pick-up and dragged through town to his death. This barbaric murder 'shocked the conscience of the country', the Senator told the Judiciary Committee. 'A strong response is clearly needed.' Er, yes. But isn't that what the state of Texas has already done? They've arrested three guys; they've charged 'em with capital murder, and, if they're convicted, they're gonna fry: this is a state that likes killing killers. It's hard to see what Ted Kennedy could add to that: insist that, after Texas has executed them and shovelled them into the ground, they're retried by the Federal courts in absentia? All he can do with his Bill is vali- date the boneheads' bigotry — by setting them apart from the common criminal, by telling them that he takes the same view as their moronic white-supremacist literature, that this isn't just a bestial act of violence but a skirmish in an ongoing race war. Effectively, the Senator is conceding to these bozos the 'political' status that IRA terrorists always sought from their British gaolers — the recognition that their bombings and murders were somehow dif- ferent from other fellows' bombings and murders. The great defence attorney Clarence Darrow knew better: 'There is no such thing as a crime of thought,' he said. 'There are only crimes of action.'
But perhaps for Senator Kennedy moti- vation really is the crucial factor. After all, for decades, as the quintessential patrician liberals, the Kennedys have professed to love the masses. Yet throughout this time they've also managed to drown, burn, run over, paralyse and statutorily rape what by any standards is an impressive number of the masses' ranks. You always hurt the one you love, as the Ink Spots used to sing. Presumably the Senator is confident that the family's customary careless insouciance towards its victims is the very antithesis of a 'hate crime'. But he should be wary of the Pandora's box — make that Panderer's box — he's opened. The definition of 'hate crime' is ever expanding — thus, the dis- abled are new additions to the proliferat- ing categories of protected persons with group rights — and, in turn, the definition of 'disabled' is ever expanding.
The last time I checked, the Federal government classified 46,023,000 Ameri- cans as disabled, or about a quarter of the adult population. I confess I was sceptical of this number: for one thing, if true, it wouldn't be so hard to find a spot in the non-disabled section of the parking lot. But that was a few months back. Since then, court decisions have decided that the Americans with Disabilities Act also applies to fat people, women who are unable to conceive and various other groups who've now pushed their number up to around 40 per cent. Those of us suf- fering from low self-esteem because our health insurance won't run to Viagra must be good for another 10 per cent or so. I figure if the courts are given till the end of the year pretty well everyone in the coun- try will be classified as disabled. And after that an ambitious prosecutor should be able to turn any crime into a 'hate crime'.
Apart from anything else, this would mean a massive increase in 'double jeop- ardy'. The principle that a man cannot be tried for the same crime twice would with- er away. An accused rapist acquitted in a state court would find he'd have to go through the same thing all over again in federal court. Rape is a particularly perti- nent example, since, in modern thinking, almost by definition it's a 'hate crime' against women. So, had this law been on the books a few years back, the Senator's nephew and drinking buddy William Kennedy Smith would have survived the state of Florida's best efforts to convict him only to find that he now had a United States attorney on his case. It will require the shrewdest strategic planning to ensure you belong to more protected victim groups than your accuser. Possibly that's what President Clinton had in mind the other day with his belated yet somehow inevitable revelation to one of his race forums that he was 'part-Cherokee': it won't be long before his lawyers are claim- ing that Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and co. are motivated by hatred of Native Americans.
Meanwhile, what of the real world where real crimes occur? In fact, gays have never been less at risk of gay-bashing, or blacks of being lynched. That's why what happened in Jasper made the front pages from coast to coast and why every white supremacist group and every black activist group from the Klan to the Nation of Islam trekked down to Texas for the funer- al: at a time of declining 'hate crimes', Jasper was all these guys had to fight over. According to the Justice Department, in 1995 there were 4,831 'hate crimes', 62 per cent of whose victims were black. Yet, according to the self-same Justice Depart- ment, there are 1.3 million interracial crimes every year, 90 per cent of whose victims are white. It is, in federal law, apparently much easier for a Caucasian to hate an African-American than vice versa. But both sets of figures ignore the most routine violent crime of all — black-on- black crime. If the Senator's Bill passes, black men will have every incentive to carry on assaulting and killing other black men: broadening their horizons and beat- ing up, say, a white lesbian would unneces- sarily double their risk.
That's not to say there aren't hate crimes. Just last week, one of the worst in recent history played out its latest round. On 25 November 1987, in Poughkeepsie, New York, a 15-year-old black girl called Tawana Brawley was found on the lawn of an apartment complex her family had moved out of two weeks earlier for non- payment of rent. The word 'Nigger' had been written on her in magic marker; there were dog faeces in her hair. She claimed to have been abducted on a back road four days previously by two white men. When she screamed for the police, one said, 'I am the police.' They took her into the woods where four other white men joined them to sodomise her non-stop for four days and nights.
It wasn't, however, just any old four days .1 'Such bitter irony. It was John Prescott's Jag that got him.' and nights. Smack in the middle was Thanksgiving, the biggest holiday in the American calendar. Could six men, includ- ing law enforcement officers, really skip Thanksgiving to spend four nights in the woods without anyone noticing? Did they have a tent? A cabin? A big picnic ham- per? Did they never think during the one night it rained that, what the hell, they'd done enough sodomising and maybe it was time to get back home before the wife and kids finished off the holiday turkey? And, after sodomising her and daubing 'Nigger' on her and spreading dog faeces in her hair, how come they were considerate enough, not to mention informed enough, to drop her off at her old apartment? And what about all the evidence showing that Tawana had spent the four days in the apartment? What about the neighbours who had seen her in there?
No matter. By now, Tawana had been entrusted to the care of three of the slick- est mouthpieces in New York's black com- munity: Alton Maddox, C. Vernon Mason and the Reverend Al Sharpton. As Tawana's flimsy story crumbled away and everyone from the District Attorney to the state Attorney-General began to realise she was a disturbed adolescent in need of help, her trio of 'advisers' grew ever more specific. 'We state openly that Steven Pagones, the Assistant District Attorney, did it,' said the Reverend Sharpton on television back in 1988, insisting that not only was Mr Pagones one of the rapists but that they could produce eye-witnesses and even sperm samples. 'If we're lying, sue us, so we can go into court with you and prove you did it.'
Well, Mr Pagones did sue, and last week he was finally vindicated in court. He owes $180,000 in legal fees and he's unlikely to collect a dime in damages from the Rev- erend Sharpton and co., who are deter- mined to appeal. At a Harlem fund-raising rally, surrounded by various other alleged victims of white brutality, the Reverend Al declined to apologise. 'I want to ask where's the place and time that Marcia Clark is going to apologise to OJ?' he said. (Marcia Clark, for those who don't watch her cable television show, was the disas- trous lead prosecutor in the OJ trial and herself a fine tribute to the pitfalls of iden- tity politics. She was chosen by the DA not on grounds of merit but because, as a women prosecuting another woman's mur- der, her gender was supposed to trump 0J's race.) When you racialise crime, when you pro- mote identity politics over individual rights, that's what you end up with: the Reverend Sharpton's ten-year destruction of one man's life because the colour of his skin happened to be convenient to the Reverend's needs. At its best, Senator Kennedy's Bill is a feeble bit of gesture politics; at its worst, it could be a bonanza for Al Sharpton and the other racial opportunists.
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